That painting with the stack of framed poems,
the one with the stairs that give you a fright
shown just a bit in the left corner,
stairs that lead up to the bell tower
and a panorama of a great religious city
with gold bells like giant overturned cups,
where the pots hang around
like copper-bottomed clouds
and there’s a pitch-black melon on a plate
on a table with two legs under a cracked window,
I bring the whole first stanza in and hang it up
in this bare example of a room,
the spider too. Details of the impasto soup
waft up in dotted lines, reaching
for the painting in which 1.) top poem
is covered with marks of looking
like pieces of packaging tape.
2.) bottom poem is translated into
an ultraviolet language, Latin.
From The Water Draft (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019). Copyright © 2019 by Alexandria Peary. Used with permission of the author.